Remembering Hannah, my one intimate, is never easy. I still see her before me at the kitchen table, her plate wiped clean of food, her right cheek resting on the palm of her hand, head tilted slightly, listening, offering that rarest of gifts: her unequivocal attention. My voice had no home until her.

Books in and of themselves are rarely boring, except for memoirs of American presidents (No, No, Nixon)—well, memoirs of Americans in general. It’s the “I live in the richest country in the world yet pity me because I grew up with flat feet and a malodorous vagina but I triumph in the end” syndrome. Tfeh!

if literature is my sandbox, then the real world is my hourglass—an hourglass that drains grain by grain. Literature gives me life, and life kills me. Well, life kills everyone.

Beginnings are pregnant with possibilities.

I am alone. It is a choice I’ve made, yet it is also a choice made with few other options available.

My country in the late 1930s was still trying to pull itself out of the fourteenth century. I’m not sure if it ever succeeded in some ways.

Death is the only vantage point from which a life can be truly measured. From my vantage point, as I watched men I didn’t recognize carry my ex-husband’s coffin away, I measured his life and found it wanting.

In other words, most of us believe we are who we are because of the decisions we’ve made, because of events that shaped us, because of the choices of those around us. We rarely consider that we’re also formed by the decisions we didn’t make, by events that could have happened but didn’t, or by our lack of choices, for that matter.

Even though I believe that the choice of a first book, the book that opens your eyes and quickens your soul, is as involuntary as a first crush, I still wish he’d chosen a different one.

There is none more conformist than one who flaunts his individuality.

Memory chooses to preserve what desire cannot hope to sustain.

We lie down with hope and wake up with lies.

Such a worrywart I am. I miss miracles blooming before my eyes: I concentrate on a fading star and miss the constellation. I overlook dazzling thunderstorms worrying whether I have laundry hanging.

I thought I’d be reading a new book today, but it doesn’t feel right, or I don’t feel like it. Some days are not new-book days.

The peasantry, when it wishes to escape peasantry, has always, for centuries, across all borders, escaped into a uniform.

Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden. She’ll also marry any infatuated suitor who promises to make her life more comfortable, no matter how inappropriate he is.

I, like everyone, want explanations. In other words, I extract explanations where none exist.

None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.

I bet you believe in the redemptive power of art. I’m sure you do. I did. Such a romantic notion. Art will rescue the world, lift humanity above the horrible quagmire it’s stuck in. Art will save you.

I wasn’t that lucky. I also can’t say that I haven’t harmed a living soul. I sold books, after all.

May I admit that being different from normal people was what I desperately sought? I wanted to be special. I was already different: tall, not attractive and all. Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe. I knew that no one would love me, so I strove to be respected, to be looked up to. I wanted people to think I was better than they were. I wanted to be Miss Jean Brodie’s crème de la crème. I thought art would make me a better human being, but I also thought it would make me better than you.

When I finish with whatever book I’m reading, I begin the last book I bought, the one that caught my attention last. Of course, the pile grows and grows until I decide that I’m not going to buy a single book until I read my stack. Sometimes that works.

Throughout her teenage years, she wrote her fantasies. They were detailed and intricate descriptions of romance, of marriage, never of sex, always of rescue. What about my fantasies? I wouldn’t consider them that—more like mild dreams or tame aspirations.

I remember reading an essay where the writer says that all we remember from novels are scenes or, more precisely, images.

Whenever I gingerly remove my mother’s noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

Dear contemporary writers, you make me feel inadequate because my life isn’t as clear and concise as your stories.

She felt the intimate loss of who she was meant to become. No loss is felt more keenly than the loss of what might have been. No nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed.

It was Camus who asserted that American novelists are the only ones who think they need not be intellectuals.

Giants of literature, philosophy, and the arts have influenced my life, but what have I done with this life? I remain a speck in a tumultuous universe that has little concern for me. I am no more than dust, a mote—dust to dust. I am a blade of grass upon which the stormtrooper’s boot stomps. I had dreams, and they were not about ending up a speck. I didn’t dream of becoming a star, but I thought I might have a small nonspeaking role in a grand epic, an epic with a touch of artistic credentials. I didn’t dream of becoming a giant—I wasn’t that delusional or arrogant—but I wanted to be more than a speck, maybe a midget. I could have been a midget.

All our dreams of glory are but manure in the end.

I’m not completely helpless. I am a functioning human being. Mostly. Just so you don’t make too much fun of me, the mostly above refers to functioning, not to human being.

I come to the museum to be by myself in the world; I am out of the apartment but not in a crowd.

Henri Matisse once said, “It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.” I love this quote, love the fact that the most incandescent painter of the twentieth century felt this way. Being different troubled him. Did he genuinely want to paint like everybody else, to be like everybody else? Did he truly wish to belong?

I like men and women who don’t fit well in the dominant culture, or, as Álvaro de Campos calls them, strangers in this place as in every other, accidental in life as in the soul. I like outsiders, phantoms wandering the cobwebbed halls of the doomed castle where life must be lived.

To write is to know that you are not home.

I had little time for a god who had little time for me.

I am inoffensiveness incarnate. I don’t expect people to love me, like me, or feel anything at all toward me. I never wanted to be prominent enough to have enemies. I’m not suggesting that I’m congenitally shy, or that I’m a wallflower whose deepest desire is to bloom into a scandalously fragrant tiger lily, just that I try to live without interfering in the lives of others because I have no wish for them to interfere in mine.

We are all children when we sleep.

There must be a word in some language that describes the anguish you experience upon suddenly coming face-to-face with your terrifying future.